Jeanette Sakel

Variation in Clause Combining: Views from the New World

Introduction It has long been recognized that the density of syntactic complexity is greater in written varieties of certain languages than in their spoken counterparts Such differences are not surprising: writers have the luxury of time to construct elaborate complex sentences, and readers the leisure to unpack them, while speakers and listeners must perform on the fly. Furthermore, writers must communicate without the benefit of prosody, a key dimension of speech, which can indicate much about the relationships between propositions. Writers are obligated to specify such relationships by other means, typically complex syntactic constructions. Some languages with uniquely oral traditions have been argued to lack syntactic complexity altogether, as seen in the Many languages without longstanding written traditions have recently borrowed conjunctions, complementizers, and relativizers from the European languages of colonizers, languages with deeply entrenched literary practices. Spanish loans of this type, for example, are particularly prominent in indigenous languages of Mesoamerica and South America. We know that structures developed within literary genres can enter the speech of writers, perhaps first in more formal registers. From there they might be passed on to other languages without writing through bilinguals. The effects need not be restricted to lexical loans. others, contact can affect grammar through grammatical replication or copying of structures from one language to another, even with no transfer of substance. These observations raise questions about how and why languages might differ in their distribution of information over sentences, in particular, in the forms, functions, and density of dependent clause constructions. In addition to the written/spoken channel, and exposure to languages with extensive literary traditions, certain typological features might correlate with differences in clause-combining strategies. There might, for example, be correlations between basic constituent order and the types of dependent clauses that develop and that can be processed easily enough by listeners to persevere. Certain patterns of syntactic complexity, such as clause chaining, might be handled more easily than others in spoken language. Many languages, particularly in the New World, can convey within a single word what can only be expressed in a multi-word sentence in most European languages. Does the difference in the distribution of information between morphology and syntax impact the distribution of information between simple and complex sentences? In a number of languages of the Americas (and beyond), formal dependency marking is used not only to mark syntactic dependency within the sentence, but also discourse dependency in …